Although he thought
he’d discovered a shortcut to the Far East when he first sighted
the Bahamas, Columbus was a decent navigator, but not nearly as grand
as the Sea Ray Navigator II, marketed by Sea Ray in conjunction with MapTech.
Introduced in January as an update to the Navigator I, the two-screen
system on our test boat dang near knocked my socks off.

The essence of the
Navigator II is a new, high-powered P3 processor that offers Windows XP-based
capabilities in conjunction with MapTech electronic cartography, aerial
photography, topographic coastal maps, and loads of other stuff, including
e-mail and weather monitoring. Additionally, our machines were interfaced
with a Koden PC radar and a Koden WAAS GPS sensor.

The upshot? Precise
overlays featuring radar, cartographic and photographic imagery, as well
as split-screen juxtapositions. Other virtues abound as well—like
I-don’t-need-to-know-much-about-computers user-friendliness and
resolution that’s bell-clear. The photo below, for example, shows
a low-range radar picture of Cowpen’s Cut near Key Largo on the
left with our test boat’s icon in red and our wake streaming off.
On the right is the same image overlaid on aerial photography, although
I could have used MapTech cartography, of course. Both images were mind-blowers,
mostly because detail in the first and overlay alignment in the second
remained rock-steady as long as I cared to look. Moreover, I took the
photo in bright sunlight.

One final groovy feature:
I operated the Koden radar by dabbing the screens with my index finger.
Touchscreen radar is a cutting-edge development certainly, but I had some
difficulty being precise while bopping through three-foot seas at speed.
I’m not a true believer... yet. —B.P.